WIN YOUR OWN PERSONAL SOUNDTRACK WRITTEN BY BILL RYDER-JONES

The Guardian are today running a competition for one lucky person to have their own personal soundtrack composed by Bill Ryder-Jones himself.

Guardian Extract:

With his new orchestral album If… former Coral guitarist Bill Ryder Jones has produced a soundtrack to Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. And now he'd like to write a soundtrack for a piece of film created by a Guardian reader.

We're looking for short clips (around a minute). They can be videos or animations, use text or still images – all we ask is they tell us something about who you are.

Bill will pick one of them, and use it as inspiration to create your own personal theme tune.

Bill says:

Can people have 'time signatures' and their own 'key'? I'd like to think so but probably not. Still, that's at the centre of this for me. Is there a way to use music theory to summarise someone you don't know and don't really have an emotional attachment to? Would you have to 'feel' something for the person to write something people can agree is worthy of being their 'theme'? Am I thinking about this too much?

We're all so used to having music soundtrack our lives on some level that we develop this tool to almost think in music. I certainly do and I have friends who would describe an event and relate it to a piece of music. It's fun to think how I can match a person's character to music. Sometimes just a feature on their face or the way they walk, something unusual or a little interesting. Oddly I've found before that it's easier writing for the elderly and babies, they seem to have more going on than everyone else.

I hope this will be a bit of fun and if you are planning on entering then just give a bit of info about yourself, anything that defines you, the music and art you love, the things you hate or whatever, just ramble. Alternatively if you just want something that sounds like an old Sega game then say that too … it'll make my life easier.

Videos can be submitted to The Guardian on this page. Entries will close at 9am on Wednesday 23 November.